Hotel de Ville de Paris, detail

WILLIAM Blackwood’s prescient statement was made in March 1839, just weeks after Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot startled the world with their announcements of photography. As a publisher Blackwood immediately grasped that the true significance of the new art would be its influence on the printed page. Unlike Daguerre, Talbot was acutely aware of this as well, for throughout his life he displayed a passion for the world of books and printing. He sited photography firmly within the world of publishing, an attitude especially apparent in his boldly experimental volume The Pencil of Nature (1844). Perhaps surprisingly, Talbot spent one decade inventing and perfecting silver-based photography before abandoning it, but three times as long, right up to the end of his life, perfecting a means of expressing nature’s image in time-tested ink on paper. Talbot “died with his boots on,” working on his invention of photogravure until the very end, a quest that moved the ph